Latest paperbacks reviewed
White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America
Fintan O'Toole
Faber and Faber, £9.99
In a planned series of three books about Ireland's contribution to the US's mythology of itself, O'Toole's first subject provides for a complication of the Irish postcolonial narrative and for an intriguing illustration of the complex history of Anglo-America. Johnson was an ambitious Irishman brokering the British Empire among the native Americans of the north-eastern frontier in the mid-18th century. Lusty and lordly in deportment, Johnson emerges in O'Toole's empathetic hands not as the cynical and greedy collaborator others would have him, but as an adept of realpolitik, whose lifelong adaptability was schooled in the complex strategies of conversion and evasion he developed at home as the scion of a Gaelic Jacobite family. O'Toole is both biographer and dramatist here, and his combination of reader-friendly narrative drive and scholarship suggests that he would surely have the flair for a fine historical novel. ... John Kenny
The Hill Road
Patrick O'Keeffe
Bloomsbury, £7.99
To say this work is sited in the same literary territory as a McGahern novel is praise indeed. It rings with authenticity; it shares a strong, vividly drawn rural setting and it is beaded with place names reminiscent of a Kavanagh poem. The Hill Road story, the longest of four, is almost a novella, and has the space and depth to track convincingly a mother-son relationship. It tracks narrator Jack Carmody's early youth to his mother's death in a Limerick hospital. There is an attractive sweetness about this story in that the adult Carmody believes he may go forth in freedom to travel the world, calm in the knowledge of who he is and from whence he came. In the other stories, also set in the borderlands of Limerick and Tipperary, the past is as weighty with memories and grudges as it is rich with delayed gratification; the stories are less than tragic, but they are gut-wrenching. ... Kate Bateman
Why the Allies Won
Richard Overy
Pimlico, £9.99
The Allies' victory in the second World War was not inevitable; in 1942 defeat appeared a far more likely prospect. The outcome depended as much on successful economic, scientific and moral resources as it did on the fighting. Thus, argues Overy, "Allied success in the long campaigns of attrition can be convincingly explained only by incorporating the role of production and invention." He examines the four main zones of conflict where the Allies emerged victorious between 1942 and 1945: the war at sea, the land struggle on the Russian front, the bombing campaign from the air and the retaking of western Europe launched on D-Day. The Allied military successes were caused by the balance of resources, more effective warfare, better leadership, mobilisation of the people at home, and a belief in the moral superiority of their cause. This is an extraordinary work that wears its breathtaking scholarship lightly. ... Brian Maye
The Planets
Dava Sobel
Harper Perennial, £7.99
The author of the magnificent Longitude this time takes on a complementary story of time and space - our solar system - with her eloquent, sharp, witty and often poetic prose. (Think Bill Bryson without the laugh-out-loud moments.) The story of the creation and evolution of our sun and the, em, nine planets is full of the pure science of the thing, but with her easy, infectious erudition it twinkles like the stellar dust scattered throughout a colourful nebula. What also amounts to a brief history of astronomy teems with engaging anecdotes about the principal characters of the science (and non-science; there is an interesting foray into astrology), and examines the gravitational affect these celestial bodies have had on art, religion and politics. And it is timely that it closes with an explanation of Pluto's imminent demotion. ... Joe Culley
Oak: The Frame of Civilisation
William Bryant Logan
Norton, £10.99
The oak has been a mainstay of human culture for thousands of years, since man first sheltered under its canopy and foraged for acorns (surprisingly filling, if not exciting, according to the author). Logan, an arbourist and writer with an appealing and clean-cut style, leaves no avenue unexplored in his paean to the great tree. Its famous mightiness - in myth, magic and manufacturing - he notes, is largely owing to the genus's omnipresence in almost all temperate areas of the earth. Through the ages Quercus has been an essential provider of food, timber, tannin, charcoal, and even ink and dye - made from the galls formed by cynipine wasps. The latter, as it happens, are just some of the creatures that depend on the tree for food and shelter. Another reason for treasuring this most congenial of trees. ... Jane Powers
The Naming of Eliza Quinn
Carol Birch
Virago, £6.99
The Naming of Eliza Quinn brings the reader deep into the horrific depths of the Irish famine. Opening in 1969 with Irish-American Beatrice Conrad staying in an abandoned Kerry cottage inherited from her grandmother, the novel moves back in time, tracing the Vesey line of Beatrice's family and its links to the cottage in which she now lives. The retrospective section of the work is divided in two, encompassing both the 1900s and the famine period of the 1840s, and narrates the dramatically intertwined lives of the Vesey family and their neighbours, the Quinns. The novel's title explicitly signals the fundamental theme of the work, that of the naming and giving voice to forgotten histories and silenced stories. Birch's stylistic strategy, the rejoining of broken links through retrospective narrative, brings together the variant time periods of the novel into a seamless unity of narrative continuity. ... Claire Bracken